


Queen to Knight

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest, The Sandbaggers
Genre: Class Differences, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Egregious Fanon Queen Pomona, F/M, MI5-SIS Rivalry, Older Woman/Younger Man, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 12:06:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14080569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Willie gets laid. And played, like a cello. But it'll probably be all right.*To antisoppist's prompt for 'Pomona Todd, Queen'.





	Queen to Knight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [antisoppist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/antisoppist/gifts).



‘I know I’m tempting fate just saying this, but I can’t believe we’ve actually made it to coffee,’ Willie Caine said, pouring cream into his. ‘Of course, he’ll probably pull up outside as we’re leaving, but still, it’s a blooming triumph as far as I’m concerned.’

It was said with such evident sincerity that Pomona could hardly resent the mild vulgarity of self-congratulation on the success of the night. Behind his sensual-everyman manner lay not more of the dull same, as she had expected, or coarse conceit and resentment, as she had feared, but a cautious gentleness. It would be almost too ironic, to go to bed with him because he reminded her of Anquetil. Anyway, he was still some way off making any actual offer of bed, and that was refreshing in itself, though she should take care it didn’t become positively unflattering.

‘If by any chance Neil Burnside _doesn’t_ materialise in a throbbing taxi,’ she said, ‘would you care to go on somewhere?’

‘Yes, but I’m afraid I don’t know a good place I could take you—near here.’ She strongly suspected that with a salary something south of 6K p.a. and a boss like Burnside, he didn’t know any nightclubs _at all_ , but the callow prevarication had its own charm. He was, she supposed, really quite a bit younger than her—she heard her mother’s voice correcting the accusative pronoun, lowered her head to look at him over her specs and gave a defiant smile.

‘There’s always my flat. It’s quite close.’

His reaction was gratifying: boyish enthusiasm quickly smothered by the conscious gentlemanliness only ever displayed by those who were not—in the class sense—gentlemen. She took a swift impression of a youth slightly overwhelmed by large matriarchal personalities, from which the touchy competitiveness of the Paras had come as a perverse relief. As she sailed into her forties, Pomona had thought of giving up men: they were so difficult, so demanding, so _boring_. After all, it didn’t mean giving up sex; she was lucky as far as that went.

Oh, but she wanted him all right. And, she thought, a bubble of glee surging in her breast, she could have him, too, now that she’d got enough on Burnside to be pretty sure they could use him to spring poor Trevor D'Arcy from this bloody awful snarl-up with the Chapman—the Ross—woman. She didn't want Caine for leverage. Just for fun. But if at some point there happened to be leverage—well. Whatever would Mother have thought of her? But it was Robert who came again to mind, blinking into his single malt and saying, ‘I once made the very great mistake of underestimating a well-brought up girl in glasses, not a nicely-turned-out one like you, though—flat, stringy hair—so I’ll assume you know exactly what I mean when I say _rough trade_.’ She hadn’t, she’d only been out of Kingscote about eighteen months. Oh _Christ_ , how she missed him. More than she missed Mother. And how was she ever going to do without him? Do her new (which was his old) job without him to turn to for advice and the occasional rum-laced cocoa in the cabin of the _Folly Light_?

* * *

 

Willie hoped, as he came to slow consciousness of what the pale dawn wall with a pale modern painting on it, the heavy blanket and crisp sheet, the floral scent that overlaid his own acrid sweat  _meant_ , that he had not actually shouted his way out of that dream. The soft, warm hump to his left didn’t seem awake, but he wasn’t fool enough to think she didn’t have practice in that department.

He knew from the quality of the light that he didn’t have to leave just yet, and he was reluctant—understandably enough—to move, wake her, hasten the moment when the night before became the morning after. _What_ a night, though. His hand began to stray south, but he halted it, aware that if he touched his half-erection it would all be over: he’d have to get up and piss, come back and—there should be a word for it, the peculiar sort of politeness you extended to someone you only barely knew, or only knew bare—overtaken simultaneously by the schoolboy silliness of the pun and the memory of her gold-top milky-smooth curves, he rolled onto his left side, groaning.

That did it, of course. She moved with a grumble and another waft of scent from her hair. ‘Hullo, Willie. Take my dressing-gown, if you like. It’s on the back of the door. Quite uneffeminate.’

It was, too, plain white towelling with green polka-dot satin trim, as if he cared. He supposed he wouldn’t have put on a chintzy pink quilted housecoat, if he was being honest.

Willie inspected himself in the fan-shaped mirror above the bathroom sink. He kept an overnight bag in the Hutch, of course, toothbrush, shaving kit and change of clothes, but he’d never used it under these circumstances before: it felt disreputably like playing at James Bond, though you could make two entire Bond girls out of Pomona Todd—in every sense, but chiefly I.Q. He wasn’t hungover, at least: they’d had a cocktail to begin, shared a bottle of wine, and a brandy back here. That was good, a man and a woman, knowing what they wanted from each other: rational, sane, adult.

He caught himself thinking it would be a very pleasant little arrangement—hell, no, he didn’t want to have to declare this—a woman at least ten years his senior, and more to the point, _MI-fucking-5_ —to Burnside, still smarting under his humiliation by Wellingham and Gibbs over the Kingmaker debacle. Anyway, she probably saw him as very strictly a one-off, a bit of rough. That stung, more than he expected. He turned around, opened the small cabinet on the opposite wall. Among mysterious little gold-and-white tubs and crystal vials with Jermyn Street addresses on them was a bottle of Listerine. He swigged from it, gargled and spat into the sink.

He was guilty, he supposed, of dividing the women he liked into two broad categories: ones he fancied, and ones who made him laugh. That was his Nan’s influence—it just always felt a bit off, a bit incestuous somehow, to want to shag a girl who was conspicuously witty. It was why he was shilly-shallying around Marianne Straker—that and to tease Burnside, couldn’t pass up a chance of that. But Pomona was something else: not even remotely a girl, for one thing. And her humour was quite different from the terse sniping of SIS—jovial, calm and disarming. That story about being King Henry VIII in the school play, and those absolute little bitches who were in league against her; it took some largeness of heart to forgive your school bullies, he should know. Really, she was far too well-adjusted to be in this game—

Oh _shit_. He sank down on the edge of the stylish beige corner bath. How could he have been such an utter pillock? Frantically, he reviewed his memory of their conversation for any shop he might have talked—just a few grouses about Burnside, really, and surely that bleak reputation already stretched as far as Five? He’d mentioned Burnside’s closeness to Ross, but only in the context of their unlikely shared penchant for tiny, slimy hamburgers from McDonalds. The Special Relationship was no secret. It might be okay, after all. Anyway, SIS had no jurisdiction in the UK, whatever Five were up to, they couldn’t be made to act. It put the tin hat on a repeat performance, though. He didn’t even much fancy going back in and saying goodbye—and, dammit, he’d been vaguely hoping that a kiss and a feel of her big breasts and ample, silken thighs might become a farewell quickie. He ran both hands through his hair, steeling himself for what was now mere chivalrous duty. As he hauled himself to his feet, he noticed a long blonde hair on the lapel of the bathrobe. He plucked it off and wound it round his little finger. Flexible and tough as one of the strings on the cello in the living-room, in the warm glow from the spotlights embedded in the ceiling, it glittered like a coronet.

**Author's Note:**

> Set between series 2 and 3 of _The Sandbaggers_ , and on the _Autumn Term_ timeline for Pomona.
> 
> Pomona's early intelligence career, and her first meeting with Robert Anquetil, are the subject of [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2840720).


End file.
